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Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.

Michael Bierut

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Michael Bierut
Age: 54
Designer
Graphic Designer
Cleveland
Ohio
Ideas
Behinds
Firsts
Behind
First
Words
Something
Helping
Animating
Good
Makes
Readable
Spirit
Typography
Doe
Helps
Best
Express

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A good cook can make something amazing out of even the blandest ingredients. Still, you don't want to eat the exact same dish every day.
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If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.
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Designs that have a whiff of complex impenetrability tends to suggest big, complicated ideas. Academic writing tends to work the same way, I understand.
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The scientists at CERN were actually surprised that people commented on this. Reportedly Fabiola Gianotti, the coordinator of the CERN program to find the Higgs Boson, was asked why she had selected Comic Sans. She simply said, Because I like it.
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Target for example, is just a dot with a circle around it, that's all it is, so if you want a logo like Target, you don't need to hire a designer, you barely need to know how to operate a computer program, the logo may as well be anything.
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Graphic design is the fiction that anticipates the fact.
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A lot of times, you design a logo to be timeless, but with something like the Olympics, timelessness is maybe not something you should be going for.
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Every little job counts. Design counts.
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I think once the artistic world of the type designer merged with the scientific world of the computer programmer, you began to see this crossover.
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I actually don't think that brand new logos are worth that much or mean that much in and of themselves. So why not have a class of third graders compete to design your logo?
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I'm not sure about my design work every time.
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The studies I've seen about readability and legibility tend to focus on a specific set of metrics: size, not just the point size, but things like the size of the lower case letters as a proportion of the overall letter height, and line length. People simply can't read really small type set in really long lines.
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Australia has always put out some good design, particularly environmental graphics. I associate that with Australia, more so that a lot of other places. Whether that has anything to do with the landscape, who knows?
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Simplicity, wit, and good typography.
Michael Bierut
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I'm always conscious of the context, the history, the specific environment of anything that I design and what it is going to be operating within.
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If you ask people in the US what logos they like and recognise, they'll name Target or Nike.
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I can see how some people get sentimental about how we used to do things in 'the good old days' but in a way I just think they are being nostalgic for the way they were brought up.
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BE PURPOSEFUL AND THOUGHTFUL IN THE CHOICES YOU MAKE WHEN THE OPTIONS ARE NEARLY INFINITE.
Michael Bierut
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We use the word typography to describe two different things: the design of letterforms, and the layout of typeset passages on a page. Both of those experiences are really important to communicating information, especially when that information involves complex ideas.
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Australia is one of the few places that I can think of where the cities, at least those I've been to, seem to have strikingly different characters and visual textures. To an American like me, there's basically Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane and the rest is all bush.
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